With the exception of celebrities and politicians (our royalty?) you don’t really get preferential treatment based on your ability to pay. (in the US)

If MedPundit really thinks that insurance doesn’t get you any preferential treatment in the US, she’s totally jumped the shark. Newsflash: Getting treatment at all is preferential treatment, Dr. Smith.

And more to the point of her post: people die on waiting lists all the time in the US, too. And Canadians requiring emergency care get it.

Comments

I’ve always thought she was a bit nuts. She allows her cherished beliefs about health care blind her to the reality on the ground.

question to ask the folk who say being uninsured doesn’t make a difference whether you get health care:

If insurance really didn’t make a difference, why do you own it?

ct:

The comment above is a little off base. If healthcare doesn’t make a difference (in terms of treatment) why do you own it?

How about, so you aren’t getting calls from collection agencies?

tfty:

The comment above is very weird.

A lot of people who wish to minimize the horror of 45 million people being uninsured say things like “In the US, people without insurance are still treated, they still get healthcare, because of EMTALA etc.”

It’s a very disingenuous attempt to make it appear that being uninsured is really not that big a deal, because everyone gets treatment anyway.

Pennie Marchetti – the FP who writes medpundit – has repeatedly said things to that effect.

It’s total BS of course. There are mountains of data that show that being uninsured is a strong, independent cause of mortality and morbidity. If you are not insured, you are simply not going to get the same healthcare as the insured or independently wealthy. Period. You can die – die – simply because you could not afford insurance.

My rhetorical question is aimed at shining the spotlight on the rank hypocrisy of those who suggest that not having insurance really wouldn’t impact the care you are able to receive.

dan:

Yes, it’s better to have insurance than not. But the turh is somewhere in the middle. Medpundit is too far on one side, you on the other.

“But, isn’t that what’s happening in Canada now? The rich can go to the States and buy their hip replacements while the poor are left to languish in Canada’s long waiting lines.”

As someone who has worked in the medical industry in canada and the u.s., I promise you there is truth in that statement. The problem is the topic is a complicated one. so for medpundit or you to make sweeping generaliztions in a couple of paragraphs is a little bit of a joke, and quite misleading.

ct:

There are two things I’d like to address.

First, the morbidity rate for the uninsured is higher than those with insurance but the quality of care is still acceptable I argue. I bet large sums of money that the morbidity rate for medicare recipients is higher than those covered by my exceptionally expensive private insurance plan. Studies have shown that even amongst the insured money translates into health. Now part of this is lifestyle factors afforded to the wealthy but part is the quality of care that money buys.

Are we going to start claiming that the absolute best and most technologically advanced medical care is a right to everyone in the world? That’s not going to work

45 million uninsured? Two recent studies say that figure is inflated. One of them puts it 8 or 9 or maybe 10 million lower.

Of those 35 million some estimates say that only 19 or 20 actually go a full twelve months without health insurance. Several million of these 20 million full time uninsured are illegal aliens. It’s probably not as high as the 9 million that some conservative think tanks claim, but I’ll settle on 5 million just because it’s in the close to the middle, in between 0 and 9 million.

That leaves 15 million Americans who go an entire year without healthcare. That is just 5% of the population and even without healthcare the quality of care they recieve compared to most of the world is exceptional. Is this really the medical ‘crisis’ we want to throw money at?

Chuck:

ct takes an old sales trick and applies it to health care. It’s called “reducing to the ridiculous” and is used to take a big number, say the monthly cost of a new car, and make it seem small enough to overcome any financial objection. In this case, they have trivialized the lack of care for 15 million people or “just 5%” of the population. Not a big deal? Let’s ask those 15 million people whose mortality and morbisity is likely to be negatively affected.

Then when do we stop that process? If that methodology is applied to clinical research, we woul dhave no orphan drugs and therapies and then Darwinism would be the best healthcare. Eliminate the weak through attrition! But in this case, it’s not their human weakness that makes them vulnerable, it’s the financial weakness of the healthcare systems.

This is a slippery slop indeed!

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This is a medical weblog--a collection of thoughts about medicine, medical training, and health policy--written by a fifth-year medical student.

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